First of all, don’t overdo it.  If it’s dry, it’s dry.  I heard someone link his call to action to survival, which was a bit of an overstatement.  Modesty in all things!

Nevertheless, since I often find myself urging clients to include emotional arguments as well as fact-based, here are a few tips.

1. Reason makes us think.  Emotions make us act.  You need both.
2. Begin with the problem that your audience faces.
3. If they don’t face a problem, begin with the opportunity they have.
4. Then talk about the consequences if they fail to take advantage of the opportunity.
5. Personalize your message.  Speak about your own experience.  Disclose something about yourself.  Confess your own struggle in regards to the issue, or a similar issue.
6. Tell stories that are about life-changing experiences.  Make sure your stories have a character, conflict, and dialogue.
7. Stories about people they know, or famous people, living or dead, are most effective.
8. Use emotional words.  I once sat through 16 people delivering the exact same presentation, and the only person I could remember when it was over was the one who said, “I love my job.”
9. Look your audience in the eye, one person at a time.
10. Smile when appropriate.  Visibly enjoy yourself.
11. Don’t talk about how dry the topic is.  Ignore the dryness, and find a way to make it moist.

The mother of the great American poet John Berryman told him, “Ever to admit you’re bored means you have no inner resources.”

Don’t let your topic bore you, or you’ll bore your audience.  Find a way to fall in love with it.

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

I think there are all kinds of voices that work for the audience, as long as they feel real and communicate enough emotional energy to engage the interest.

A few vocal things that can get in the way are:

1. Uptalk. Rising intonations at the ends of sentences, making the speaker sound like a goofy teenager.

2. Glottal fry. Gargling your words. Grinding your vocal chords to make the sounds at the ends of words. That bubbling splashing frying sound that comes (mostly) from young women.

3. Mumbling. Failure to shape the consonants in your speech, and failure to project belief in what you’re saying. It’s both a mechanical and a psychological problem.

4. Speaking too fast. Not good when you’re speaking to senior leaders–makes you look nervous. Studies show you and your point of view are more likely to be “derogated” if you speak too quickly, although listeners tend to rate fast talkers as more “extroverted.”

5. Speaking too slowly. A much rarer problem. Makes you sound like you just fell off the back of a pumpkin truck. Kind of a country bumpkin pumpkin. Plus, you’re a stark contrast to all the fast talkers around you.

All of these things can be addressed and corrected with some basic voice training.

We have been helping speakers for over twenty years increase the persuasive impact of what they say and how they say it.

The voice may not demand the same intellectual resources as strategic messaging, but like it or not, it is required equipment if you want to move the mountain of corporate opinion.

We are judged by how we speak, write, and think…in that order.

And people will long remember what you sound like after they’ve forgotten what you said.

(Unless you happen to be like the speaker in the picture, in which case they will remember what you said and how you sounded.)

New research shows that when people need help getting a job done, they’ll choose a congenial colleague over a more capable one.  This tendency has big implications for every organization–and for everyone who seeks to be persuasive as a presenter.

When given the choice of whom to work with, people will pick one person over another for any number of reasons: the prestige of being associated with a star performer, for example, or the hope that spending time with a strategically placed superior will further their careers.  But in most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria.  One is competence at the job, the other is likability.  Obviously both things matter.  Less obvious is how much they matter–and exactly how they matter.

To gain some insight into these questions, researchers at Harvard Business School asked people in North America and Europe how often they had work-related interactions with every other person in the organization.  They then asked them to rate all the other people in the company in terms of how much they personally liked each one and how well each did his or her job. 

These two criteria–competence and likability–combine to produce four archetypes (see the above quadrants on the graph):  the competent jerk, who knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with; the lovable fool, who doesn’t know much but is a delight to have around; the lovable star, who’s both competent and likable; and the incompetent jerk, who …well, that’s clear enough.

These archetypes are caricatures, of course.  Companies weed out the hopelessly incompetent and the socially clueless.  Still, people in your organization can be roughly categorized in the matrix, I’m sure.

The research showed that no matter what kind of organization studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk.  Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools.

The studies done in four very different organizations consistently showed that most people would choose a “lovable fool” (someone who, to varying degrees, is more likable than competent) over a “competent jerk.”

At first glance, such a choice is both understandable (it’s nice to be around people you like), and cockeyed (why would you prefer to work with someone who is, to a certain degree, incompetent?)

The answer has something to do with social networks, and getting work done without friction.  After all, if everyone likes the fool, they’ll help him out and enjoy doing it.  In fact, the lovable fool may actually contribute to the productivity of the group. 

Isn’t it strange how powerful personality is?  A good personality covers a host of sins.  I’m always drawn to a speaker with a personality, and I think I’m more likely to buy what they’re selling and remember what they say. 

And isn’t it wonderful that we can point to evidence that being more likable than competent is valuable to the work process–more valuable than being a highly competent jerk?

Looks like an emotional decision can be rational after all.

No one likes to be pulled from a warm bed and thrust into a cold shower.  And many people I’ve met feel the same about being plucked from the blanket of everyday life to stand alone on a stage with a thousand pairs of eyes on them.   And so, when they find themselves on stage, they naturally seek refuge.

They seek refuge in two ways.  They disappear emotionally by making themselves small, or they try to dominate by increasing their size.

Disappearing emotionally is a remarkable human art.  Some of us have had an “out-of-body” experience when presenting, which is similar to the experience of passing out when in great pain: It’s a way of avoiding a difficult reality.

When I was very young, I caught a baby rabbit in my bare hands because when he saw me coming, he froze and played dead.  I walked right up to him, picked him up and took him home to show my mother.  I was very proud of myself.

Some of us become adept at disappearing emotionally as children, either because we observe that others are not emotionally present,  or we are taught that we should keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves.  As adults, we might therefore use words, gestures, and a tone of voice that basically say, “I wish I weren’t here.”

We make ourselves absent or small by using words such as, “I guess,” “I think,” “Sort of,” “like, you know,” “kind of,” and many other common expressions that communicate uncertainty.

We absent ourselves by avoiding eye contact, slouching, hiding our hands, stepping back, and shifting our weight back and forth, as though we felt safer as a moving target.

And finally, we communicate absence or smallness by speaking too quietly, speaking too quickly, or using a rising intonation at the ends of our sentences, as though we were asking a question or seeking approval for our thoughts.

How do we make ourselves appear to be bigger than we actually are?

We use words that make us sound important, such as, “We anticipate experiencing considerable weather,” when we actually mean, “The plane ride will be bumpy.”

We might say, “We need to precipitate brand loyalty before the advent of competitive intrusion,” when we really mean, “Let’s get ‘em hooked on our stuff before the other guys come out with theirs.”

In other words, we try to sound like an institution instead of a person.

We make ourselves bigger with our bodies too.  We wear suits with padded shoulders.  We wear shoes with high heels.  We expand our gestures to occupy more space, like peacocks spreading their tails to frighten other males away.  And we practice a look of stern intention, focusing our eyes on one person at a time, as if to say, “I am a force to be reckoned with.  I will brook no dissent.”

Finally, we make ourselves bigger with our voices, by projecting more forcefully, be elongating vowels, by actually speaking in a sing-song cadence that echoes from the early 19th century but still lives in some of our political candidates.

We make ourselves smaller and bigger because we are scared.  We are scared because we are afraid of the audience.  We are afraid of the audience because we don’t know them, or we know them too well, or we simply have no experience speaking to groups.

We make ourselves small in the hope that we will not be noticed.  We make ourselves bigger hoping that the audience will not notice that we are small.  We change into something we’re not because we are afraid that, as we are, we are not all that impressive.

It’s a cop-out to be smaller than you are.  It’s a put-on to be bigger than you are.  The sweet spot is to trust that you’re big enough.

“What do I do with my hands?” is one of the most frequent questions I get from people striving to improve their public speaking skills. The answer is more complicated than you’d think.

First of all, why is it important? It’s important because your hands speak quite loudly to the emotional radar of the audience. They can speak of your confidence and your delight in the topic, or of your anxiety and self-doubt.

A little anxiety is a good thing, because it tells your listeners that you care about doing a good job, and that you are a real person–like them.

But too much anxiety, demonstrated by wringing of hands, or fingernail cleaning, or spit-balling (rolling an imaginary spit ball between thumb and fore-finger), will undermine your credibility.

To do a good job, you need to let your hands talk, for two reasons. First, using your hands enables you to find the right word more efficiently, and second, your gestures enable the audience to better understand your meaning.

Please visit Science Daily to read more.

Here is a description of Vincent Scully, a Sterling Professor at Yale, giving a lecture on Classical Greek columns, insisting that “they rise like jets of water.” He is considered by many to be the best lecturer that Yale has ever seen.

“You can make that shape with a paddle in the water,” he says, of the scrolls on the capital. “It’s geometric. It’s hydraulic.”

…his hands reach out, turning and undulating, as if he means to conjure the image to life on the stage.

When he shows [a slide of] the huge choir window behind the altar at Chartres, he remarks that you have to climb uphill to the cathedral, and still seem to be climbing once inside.

“You get the feeling there’s a great tide coming. If you’ve ever rowed, and the tide changes…” Here he reaches out with both hands for imaginary oars and lays his back into it, as if toward the heavenly light behind the altar.

You may be thinking that your subject matter, your venue, or your temperament, prevent you from such theatricality. Doubtless there are moderating circumstances. But that does not negate the value of physical expression in front of an audience.

Hitler was a great speaker (not a great man.) He studied body language with some of the great actors of the German theater. He rehearsed, and had himself photographed. He made his passion and conviction visible and psychologically vivid for his audience. He used his gestures to help bring his message to life.

So my counsel to those who ask, “What should I do with my hands?” is, “Let them help you talk.”

And if they have trouble with that, I will ask them to do what Robert Lloyd, a great English actor, once asked me to do: wave them around while rehearsing. Don’t worry if they (your gestures) make sense. Break the habits of a lifetime with a sense of play. And, while playing, don’t allow your hands to touch your body. Keep them at arms length, making big gestures.

And then comes the final question. “What do I do with my hands when I’m not using them?”

If you’re the Prince of Wales, you hold them behind your back. If you’re Jesse Jackson, you press your fingertips together with isometric instensity. If you’re toasting at the country club, you may hold a glass of wine in one hand and have the other parked in the garage of your blazer’s pocket.

But ideally, I would like to see your body full of intention. You are there to get your point across. Your purpose is well-served if you bring yourself to life, not only intellectually, but emotionally, vocally, and physically as well.

And since your hands are such strong allies (and therefore, dangerous enemies if they go against you) I would keep them gainfully employed much of the time.

And when they need a rest from their labors, let them hang at your sides at the ends of your arms. They’re like bats–your hands. They like to sleep upside down. When their flying days are over, hang ‘em in the bat cave, down by your hips, at the side of your body, (and not in your pockets.)

I once had a colleague who said that everyone is in two businesses: their own, and show biz. He didn’t go far enough. Every business is show business. Business would be impossible without acting skills. Theater artists have the talent to believe in the imaginary circumstances of the script and act so as to induce the audience to believe in the characters and the story. A business communicator must also believe in her product, idea, or service—and speak so as to create belief in others.

As a business speaker you have a better chance of making others believe in your idea, product, or service if you believe in them yourself.  If you don’t believe in your product, you’ve got to scratch and claw your way into belief. How? How do you hoist yourself into contagious belief? The simplest way is to rehearse.

Find the reasoning. Find the words. Find the attitude. Find the gestures that make you feel connected with yourself and the subject. If you’re not turning yourself on when you talk you’re turning the audience off.

Which is more convincing: a speaker’s conviction or her reasoning? Isn’t that the same as asking which blade in a pair of scissors does the cutting? You need both. Intelligent people will dismiss conviction without clear thinking. And reasoning without an emotional investment by the speaker is busywork—boring, pedantic, and inconsequential to all. You need both—reasoning and conviction.

Reason makes them think.  Emotion makes them act.

Rehearsing aloud, you acquire both. And they feed each other. You find words that bring your thoughts to life, and when your thoughts are lively, you grasp them with greater conviction and infuse them with passion. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Eloquence is reason set on fire.” Rehearsal can help you find the reason and set it on fire.

So what are the standard excuses that the business presenter makes when she says she can’t or won’t rehearse?

No time! (He’s making slides five minutes before show time, making his performance slide.)
No need! (She’s done the same talk a thousand times; her suit could make it, and often does.)
No sense! (He thinks rehearsal makes him stale. Without it, he’s cooked.)
No standards! (Everybody in her company/industry is mediocre. Why should she be any different?)
No ego! (He doesn’t want to experience the awkwardness and vulnerability of finding his own voice, alone or in front of colleagues. Wimp!)
No show! (She thinks showmanship is unprofessional, which smacks of sour grapes. She’s probably afraid she doesn’t have the gene.)
No guts! (If he doesn’t rehearse, he’ll have an excuse when his talks flab out and fail.)

A good presentation can make a career. A bad one can leave you clinging to the suburbs of success for years to come. Actors get a month; we only get a few days. Let us remember that business without show business is no business. Rehearsal makes our thinking crisper, our language more vivid, and our passion a better ally. Without rehearsal, we have no show. If you have any sense, you’ll rehearse.

For more on what constitutes preparing for important presentations, see Ford Harding’s Blog.

Derrick called and spoke a mile a minute. His boss, the founder of a new hedge fund and the primary money runner had to speak at a capital intro in a week. Could I come and help?

I asked if the boss knew what he wanted to say, and Derrick said yes, but the talk was not developed yet and he (the boss) wouldn’t have time to devote to it until the weekend.

I asked about the boss. Derrick said he was really smart but not all that experienced speaking to large groups and hard to pin down because he was so busy keeping his eye on the markets.

We set up two meetings. The first to hammer out what the message would be; the second to practice saying it. I asked for a general summary of what would be said. Derrick replied, “He’s going to talk about distressed securities.”

“Is he going to say something unusual about them, or is he going to say something predictable but try to say it well?” I asked.

“By that question, I can tell that you are going to be helpful,” said Derrick, assuring me that I would not see any drafts until I arrived.

When I walked in the door, the receptionist seemed to be expecting me. She jumped up and escorted me into a meeting room off the lobby.

Derrick arrived like clock-work. He handed me his business card, made from the thickest card stock I’ve ever felt. I enthused over the feel of his card. He seemed to enjoy that. It broke the ice.

He briefed me on the status of the script and slides (a work in progress) and then in came his boss, backing into the room as he spoke to an assistant down the hall.

Peter was small and intense, with long hair and granny glasses. If Derrick was natty and professional, Peter was rumpled and professorial. Derrick excused himself immediately and closed the door as he left.

Peter had a handful of wrinkled papers in his hand. They were his notes. He did not know how to connect his computer to the projector, or how to use PowerPoint well enough to re-sequence the slides.

However, his knowledge of distressed securities was encyclopedic and his speech was supersonic. He had so many thoughts stampeding from his mind to his mouth that they got stuck on his tongue and toppled over each other.

Hummingbirds beat their wings 15 to 80 times per second, depending on the species. If a hummingbird could speak, that’s how fast Peter talked.

When I asked questions about his meaning to help him clarify what he wanted to say and in what order, he was wonderfully patient with my modest understanding of his discipline, and used analogies and metaphors to explain his point—a sign, I think, of a good communicator.

In addition to speaking like a hummingbird, he did not look me in the eye, and did not relate what he said to the bar charts on the screen. But he spoke with visceral passion and emphatic verve about the coming crisis in corporate debt—and that made up for his other sins as a speaker. He could lift up his whole body and jump into a key word with both feet–giving it real meaning and significance.

When our rehearsal led him to a new thought, he leaned over the conference table, pawing through his wrinkled pages, and jotted  words on a spare corner of the paper.

He was trying to say that the imminent credit crunch would not be like past credit crunches, due to recent care-free lending practices. In fact, due to covenant-light loans, and CCC loans, he argued, we would not get early warning signs of trouble: we would be in the middle of the crisis all at once.

The challenge was to build the story so that the audience would think they were hearing a standard pitch about the potential attractive opportunities in distressed debt, and then yank the tablecloth out from under the meal spread before them to reveal something entirely new and terrifying.

After two meetings, we had cut the slides down to six and the timing down to less than ten minutes. He had no time to rehearse. He promised he would work on it in his hotel room when he arrived at the capital intro. I continued to e-mail suggestions to his Blackberry over the weekend.

I learned from Peter that he did not rehearse until he was on the plane, and then he stayed up most of the night in a panic working on it.

Two days after the event, he called to say it went well, and that my messages had helped. I called Derrick to get his assessment, who said it was a little short—much shorter than the presentations made by other speakers. I pointed out that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As Mrs. Hubert Humphrey said to her husband after a particularly long stem-winder, “Hubert, for a speech to be immortal, it need not be interminable.”

The question will be whether Peter can:
1. Get attention at capital intros.
2. Keep attention
3. Make a clear point in a memorable way
4. Stand out in a crowded field
5. Move people to come talk with him.

That’s it. He doesn’t have to sell the fund, or close the deal. His job is to generate trust and curiosity.

Let’s take the word presenting. Let’s play with it.

Could it mean bringing ideas, and information into the present?

For instance, could we say that the job of a candidate for office is to make real the information about her past (her track record, how we got in this pickle), make palpable the dangers from overseas, and make vivid the picture of the future she wants to lead us toward?

None of these things are actually present at her speech. Her past is buried in her memory unless she tells the story well. The foreign threats are oceans away. The future is a bank of fog to be sculpted, mainly by random events. And yet her job is to make us feel the importance and power of each of these absences.

To make the absent present! That’s a good definition of presenting. Suppose you’re a pharma brand director selling your marketing plan to senior executives. Is your product present? Probably not, because more than likely your product is an idea–a molecule– and has been embodied by manufacturing. It’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s an idea!

Is your market present? No, it’s absent because it doesn’t actually exist. It too is an idea. We conceive of all that drives people to buy and sell and give that conception a name: the market. It too is everywhere and nowhere. It is also an idea.

And of course your plan is an idea–an idea that is developed based on an accumulation of information about the market. The only way to introduce your idea to your audience is through the skillful use of symbols–words and images.

Suppose you’re a manager of a Hedge Fund, and you want to raise assets under management. Does your product exist in the room in which you’re presenting? Well, yes, it does to a certain extent, because the product is you and your judgment, coupled with the judgment and expertise of others on your team.

But in the selling of investment management services, the product is value, and what that value means to the recipient. Is that value present? No, it’s not. The professional presents her idea for creating value, and if the prospect is convinced that the idea will work, he buys it.

It seems to me that presenting is a performance art designed to bring the past, the future, and the invisible into the present. The tools of the art are too numerous to name, but the main ones are words, pictures, stories, and logic–not to mention the intangible human traits of the speaker, and the speaker’s ability to connect her idea to the predispositions of her audience.

Because the human mind cannot hold many thoughts at once, the skilled presenter creates one present at a time. A film director does the same thing. He shows one scene at a time. The film director has many more tools, such as music, and moving images, and environmental sound. But the presenter only has her voice, her skilled use of language, and her ability to paint pictures with story telling or visual aids.

The driving force of presenting is imagination, and the verbal skills required to make the absent present.

Recently, a client of mine, who is also a childhood friend, left me a voice mail saying that he did not think my short article on the power of gesture to create emotion was appropriate for the market I serve. Essentially, the short piece tried to make the point that speakers can alter their inner emotional state by finding a gesture to do (in private) that can move them out of fear and anxiety and into calmness and confidence.

He said that the suggestion seemed too “pop” and “retail” and inappropriate for sophisticated people. To him, it seemed like something he would find in an airline magazine.

I am grateful for his honesty, and for his trust that I would take his comment in the right way. I know he is watching out for my best interests.

I would like to try to make the point again (and here in public) in a way that makes it more palatable to him and those who might think as he does.

We all agree that just as feelings create physical gestures (happiness puts a spring in your step), gestures can stimulate feelings (raising your hands above your head and punching the air in triumph tends to lift a sagging mood.)

As speakers, we want to present ourselves as enthusiastic upbeat people who are excited about our material. If we happen to be nervous, a few fist pumps, or jumping jacks, or whatever, done out of sight of the audience, will serve to prime our emotional pumps.

Also, while sophisticated people may reject the idea that they could benefit from using creative gestures as an offstage tool to create more positive inner states (even though they admire dancers, actors and singers who use just those techniques to bring their material to life) they themselves might more effectively bring their own complex messages to life with a bit more expressiveness.

I taught acting for many years under the tutelage of Michael Chekhov and his disciples, and I now serve on the board of MICHA–the Michael Chekhov Association. Michael Chekhov was the nephew of Anton Chekhov, and he was considered the greatest actor of the 20th century in Russia.

Michael Chekhov disagreed with Stanislavsky about how actors should create the inner life of their characters. Stanislavsky suggested, for instance, that when called upon to cry, the actor should recall his “dying grandfather” or some other sad event, a technique he called sense memory. Michael Chekhov, on the other hand, suggested that creative gesture can stimulate sensation, and that sensation is the vessel into which we can pour our creative feelings.

I think both can work, but I tend to lean toward Chekhov. The technique of sense memory removes us from the immediate circumstances, and asks us to visualize something that occurred, or will occur, at another time and place.

Gesture, on the other hand, gives me an immediate physical and psychological jolt that arouses my vitality and sense of play. I can walk out on stage with an inner feeling that I have the energy and will to do my best.

The body can speak to the inner life, and when necessary, we can use gesture as a tool to create a more appealing and effective presence.

Science, like the rest of us, advances through trial and error, better known as dumb luck.

One summer day in 1991, neuroscientists in a lab at Parma University wired up a monkey’s brain for a simple experiment. They wanted to see which neruons fired during the series of movements involved in the everyday act of drinking from a cup.

But on that day the monkey was more interested in a student eating an ice cream cone. The monkey watched intently as the student moved the cone to his mouth and, as it watched, the motor neurons in its brain began to fire, indicating that the animal was moving its arms and hands. In fact, the monkey was perfectly still.

This suggests (they say) that our brains mimic, or mirror, the movements we observe, even though we don’t actually make the gestures. We are “moved” when observing the movements of others. In fact, scientists tell us that our brains have “mirror neurons” responsible for replicating the brain maps of gestures made by others.

While it’s nice to have science confirm this, didn’t we know it already? When we watch someone hit his thumb with a hammer, and he winces in pain, we make the same gesture.

When we see someone cover his face with his hands and shake with sobs, we can’t help but be moved, even though we don’t replicate the gesture.

And when we watch a speaker step out from behind the lectern, and we see that his or her body is free of tension, and even more importantly, full of intention, our brains recognize the speaker is confident in what she’s saying, and certain parts of our brains light up, and more importantly, she is more likely to exert influence over us.

As a great Roman said, “Unless the delivery stands guard over the material, the material will evaporate, no matter how precious it was in itself.”

There is no right way to “deliver” your thoughts: there is only your own best way. If you restrain yourself from gesturing, your audience feels your restraint. If you make exaggerated, unfelt gestures (because you’ve read and misinterpreted this blog) your audience feels that you are artificial. But when you allow your voice and body to express what your message means to you, they feel the meaning of your message.

And so I have a renewed interest in the body language and micro-movements of my clients. It doesn’t have to be elegant, but it does have to be full of intention.

I am still looking for a unified field theory of presentation skills, and when I find it, I will check to make sure that the mind-body connection is a significant part of it. The brain is in the skull, but the mind is in every cell.